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Canadian military police cleared in Afghanistan abuse report

Eight military police officers were cleared of wrongdoing for not investigating Canadian commanders who may have turned a blind eye to battlefield detainees being tortured by Afghan authorities

Canadian soldiers lead detainees from a residential compound in southwest Kabul following a raid in 2004. (Master Cpl. Brian Walsh / DND file photo)

By Allan WoodsOttawa Bureau

Wed., June 27, 2012

OTTAWA—Eight military police officers were cleared of wrongdoing for not investigating Canadian commanders who may have turned a blind eye to battlefield detainees being tortured by Afghan authorities.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government penchant for secrecy bore the brunt of the Military Police Complaints Commission’s criticism in the final report of a four-year investigation of Canada’s handling of Afghan detainees.

But after reams of public testimony, years of political brinksmanship and several on-the-ground investigation of Afghanistan’s notorious prisons, the last avenue for probing whether Canadian politicians and military leaders broke international law by putting detainees in the custody of potential torturers has run its course with no conclusive result.

NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said the day of reckoning will come for the government and the generals who ran the war when the allegations came to light in 2007.

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” he said. “It’s a matter of who’s going to be accountable here and if it’s not this government then maybe one in the future.”

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Coming at the tail end of Canada’s stay in Afghanistan, and one year after the end of combat operations in Kandahar, the report is already a historical document in some respects. The 900 Canadian soldiers now deployed are training Afghan police and soldiers. They rarely see a gun fight, let alone an insurgent prisoner.

But large sections of the report focus on government efforts to stifle the inquiry by censoring vital documents, preventing witnesses’ cooperation and launching legal challenges to limit the probe. Those remain relevant and instructive for similar inquiries in the future, the commission report says.

The difficulties that the detainee inquiry faced were identical to and just as damaging as the procedural tactics employed by the military and prime minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government nearly two decades ago during the Somalia Inquiry into the murder of a local teen at the hands of a Canadian soldier and the underlying problems within the military, commission chair Glenn Stannard wrote.

“The commission holds out the hope that future public interest investigations and hearings will be carried out in the spirit of cooperation and respect that the public has a right to expect,” his report said.

Stannard’s final report includes four recommendations:

Two procedural proposals include finding a way to more easily make available documents and other information to the commission and allowing MPCC officials access to sensitive materials in order to determine what information is relevant and what should be redacted from public view.

The two other recommendations relate to the military police force, which was cleared of charges brought by Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association that its officers neglected their duty to investigate whether top commanders knew that battlefield detainees could be abused in Afghan jails.

Despite the high profile testimony of diplomat Richard Colvin that Canada’s diplomats and generals were well aware of the likelihood of mistreatment, the commission said the military police mandate ended once detainees left their cells at Kandahar Airfield.

The on-base legal authorities also weren’t consulted about how to improve Afghan prisons, nor were they aware of reports from visits made to local jails by diplomats, like the one where cables and a rubber hose used in the abuse were found under the seat of a chair in an interrogation room.

But the commission did point to several gaps and weaknesses in the military police force and suggested more effort be spent preparing officers about the conditions, operational challenges and legal issues they will face when they deploy to an ongoing mission.

Instead of a seamless transition between deploying military police, the commission described a system where officers would relieve one another every six months without sharing intelligence or updating colleagues about ongoing investigations.

In one case, even the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall — the military’s equivalent of police chief — didn’t learn until after the fact that soldiers had stopped transferring detainees to Afghan officials because of likely abuse.

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